


light that you can touch.

by thehandsingsweapon



Series: Born to Make (Art) History - Promo Telephone Game [5]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M, art history telephone game!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 06:45:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17319968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsingsweapon/pseuds/thehandsingsweapon
Summary: Victor and Yuuri look at some art together on a date in Italy. That's it. That's the whole show.





	light that you can touch.

They’re on a date. 

It’s a small museum in Italy, the collection of this or that old noble family stored in this or that old noble house, now freshly restored for tourists, made accessible to the general public. Somewhere, perhaps, an Italian ancestor spirit is wringing its hands over this invasion of hearth and home, but Yuuri believes so strongly that beauty is meant to be shared that he once nearly sabotaged his own relationship just to send Victor Nikiforov back out into an appreciative and adoring world, sharing the thing he’s loved for far longer than he’s loved Yuuri. So he appreciates the grand accessibility of it now; appreciates that the son of innkeepers is here, sitting next to a living legend, looking at things that are lovely together, with no barriers between them or the beautiful things this place holds.

Yuuri imagines they’re here for a few reasons. 

First, Victor Nikiforov is an unapologetic, enthusiastic tourist, and in their two seasons together now as coach and student, he has never once been able to resist the siren-song of  _ museum!  _ or  _ castle!  _ or  _ ninjas?!?  _ It’s nice to see him like this, his never-ending, relentless curiosity activated, lit up like a spark applied to gasoline or a brief, powerful bolt of lightning. It’s especially lovely now that they’ve been together long enough for Yuuri to know that it isn’t always this way, that there are parts of Victor that he tries to keep hidden and pretends don’t exist, parts of him where words like enthusiasm or interest are distant and unknown feelings, strangers from foreign lands who rarely visit and never stay for long. 

They’re also here because Victor wants to spend time with him, and show him around, and sweep him into new and exciting experiences. It’s one of the ways Victor expresses himself and his love; he’s an intolerable show-off and excessive with gifts, which is why Yuuri’s also bundled into a new plaid peacoat, and why Victor himself is modeling the latest in magazine-ready, fashion-plate designer trousers, a crisp button-down shirt, and a hat that is a more modern take on Yakov Feltsman’s — which Yuuri hopes he’s not wearing because he’s getting sensitive about his hairline  _ again _ . Yuuri is here because he likes spending time with Victor, and he’d do it anywhere, not just in this museum but also, if necessary, stuck at a train station navigating inexplicable delays or waiting on Aeroflot to track down their lost luggage or, hell, even at a dentist appointment getting his own cavities filled.

But there is something interesting and different about the fact that it’s an art museum they’re together at now. Yuuri has learned that Victor is a man of many masks, and spent their first year together patiently watching him recalibrate around the concept of  _ simply being himself.  _ In this way they’re foils: Yuuri is an open nerve, forever raw and exposed, and in some ways he’s fragile because of it — but he also, Victor has taught him, is more intuitive, more decisive. He does all the things a nervous system does: relays and processes signals, changes, evolves. Victor is something more like a construct, someone who took the idea of  _ being an idea  _ much too seriously, who has been pretending to be so many different things for so long that he stopped, a very long time ago, revealing anything about himself.

Except that he loves art.

Yuuri’s been able to see that much from the very beginning, when Victor moved into Hasetsu not just with his suitcase but with a painting of a lady and a stone bust of a Greek statue that seemed to serve no other purpose but to stare ominously at Yuuri the first few nights he ever dared to share Victor’s room. Victor arrived in Hasetsu with boxes full of books; Victor listens to music and plays records all the time, and when he does he taps his finger on his chin and narrows his eyes. Yuuri has learned to watch for the micro-expressions, the tiny tells, little things he’s catalogued which always telegraph Victor’s first sparkles of delight. 

They’re sitting together in front of a painting of a sunset cast over the ocean. There are three other empty benches in the room; opportunities to look at, perhaps, the painting of some woman, or a country landscape, and instead they’re sitting here. In spite of appearances to the contrary, very little Victor ever does by accident. Here, in the museum, Victor looks at pieces of art with that same discerning expression, and in a million subtle ways, he is choosing where to spend his time. 

And Yuuri looks at Victor. He sees it: that subtle twitch around the edge of his mouth, right before Victor habitually re-shapes his smile into something ready for public consumption.

Victor does not really talk about himself naturally. He is a never-ending encyclopedia of publicly available facts: he will talk ad nauseam about past contests, past lovers, every alternate name he considered before settling on Makkachin — he obfuscates with minutia. But the habit of showing who he is, well, that’s a muscle he’d let atrophy over time, and it’s places like this that have a tendency of unmasking who Victor is without his even saying a word, because of what he looks at, and where his eyes linger, and what he does.

Little things like this are his diary.

“What is it that you like so much about it?” Yuuri asks. He does not ask  _ if  _ Victor likes it; he knows, he can tell. He’s validated by the immediate tilt of Victor’s head and the soft lift of his eyebrows, and then by a subtle, self-deprecating smile.

“You noticed,” Victor murmurs, which he always says like it’s a surprise, like he expects one day Yuuri will become disinterested in these little studies of what makes Victor tick and discontinue the effort. It would be almost unfathomable for Yuuri, except for his own very similar, equally irrational fear: someday Victor is going to discover how uninteresting and simple he is, and leave before Yuuri ever learns all there is to know about him, processes him so fully and completely that he’ll never truly be gone.

For now, Yuuri simply hums and lets their shoulders bump. Victor reaches up and brushes his cheek. “You know I like the sea,” he says, but that’s not enough: that’s a fact, like how Victor’s favorite colors are blue and pink, and that he has, in his possession, a watch that’s more expensive than all of Yuuri’s skating gear combined. Yuuri barely dignifies it with a response, and so Victor’s expression grows subtly more serious. “It’s the light,” he says. “You know how at dawn and at sunset the light changes? The color of it is different. And sometimes it streaks.”

“Like after a storm?”

“Yes. Like that exactly.” Victor’s thumb presses into the corner of Yuuri’s mouth, a kiss delivered by the pad of his finger instead of his lips. Before Victor, Yuuri would never have let himself lean into a caress like this, would never tilt his head into a palm or let his lashes drift closed. A lot of things were different before Victor. “There’s something about it,” he explains. “On the one hand, that kind of light seems a lot more real than ordinary daylight. Almost like you could reach out and touch it, or gather it up into a glass. And on the other hand, something about it is completely magical, and out of this world, and …”

And he shrugs rather than finishing the sentence, but Yuuri knows what it would be:  _ and that’s the kind of art that I like.  _ He thinks about it with his eyes closed — considers the Victor he once saw flit across his television screen, at once realer than anything else in Yuuri’s entire life, and at the same time impossible and otherworldly and fey in a way that nobody else could ever possibly replicate. 

“I like it,” he says back. He opens his eyes, and reaches up to touch the bones of Victor’s wrist, to lace their fingers together. He looks at the man he will spend the rest of his life with. He smiles. Victor smiles, too: the real smile that exists at the heart of who he is, the one that’s luminous as the dawn and shining as the sea. “Light that you can touch.”

 


End file.
